Chrysalis

38

At noon, Asperton convened a war-room meeting. Rather than her own private eyrie in the Chrysalis Tower, she chose Peyton’s subterranean office beneath the Torus, from which Logan had watched Karel Mossby being apprehended.

Peyton and Asperton were at the conference table, along with Kramer and a man Logan hadn’t seen before: short, very thin, with smooth features and tightly curled black hair, cut in an almost military fade. The privacy shades were up, and Logan noticed the worker drones in the huge room beyond were even busier than when he’d first seen them.

“We have twenty-four hours left,” Asperton told the assembled group. “Most of the funds should be in our hands this evening, once the Asian markets open. The rest — God willing — we’ll have by ten a.m. Monday, at the latest.” She glanced at Peyton. “You’ll be ready? On the crypto side of things?”

Peyton nodded.

“Shouldn’t Wrigley be here?” Logan asked.

“He refused to come. Said there wasn’t any point anymore; nabbing Mossby was foolish; that his time would be better spent cleaning up the mess ‘the security goons’ had made of his department.”

Guess he’s finally been shaken back to reality, Logan thought to himself. Learning that Omega, and VR, might be off the table as suspects had probably helped. But why would he dismiss Mossby’s apprehension? He’d fired Mossby, after all — and the guy had spent a lot of time afterward trying to break back into Omega.

“Wrigley,” Peyton muttered. “What a fucking prima donna.”

Asperton glanced from him to the stranger sitting at the far side of the table. “So, Virgil Snow. Did this morning’s communiqué yield any new information?”

The man, wearing a suit so somber it would make the secret service envious, shook his head. “Same delivery mechanism as the other four. Spoofed internal VPN, run through an anonymizer. Impossible to trace.”

Instead of trying to understand, Logan instead watched the speaker. Virgil Snow — at least twice, Peyton had spoken via his Omega to someone he’d addressed as Snow. Logan guessed this was the person in charge of the cyber strike force.

Kramer, head of Security, turned toward Snow. “What about that sieve sort Logan here asked for? Any bad apples other than Mossby turn up?”

“We identified six employees even remotely capable of doing — or wanting to do — something like this,” Snow replied. He had a strange accent: Flatbush or elsewhere in Brooklyn, filtered through Beacon Hill. “But they were already on our radar. We ran additional back-tracing on every last one.” He shook his head. “Nothing.”

There was a brief pause around the table.

“So here’s where we stand,” Claire said, straightening her shoulders. “We know Spearman secretly had one of our implants installed. Bridger had one, too… completely different, of course. And Marceline was killed by an exotic, nation-state-grade poison.”

Peyton turned to Logan. “How does that mesh with your ‘commonalities’?” he asked with a tinge of sarcasm.

“Actually, it’s the first real connection we’ve made.”

“What connection?”

“All along, these aggressors have been encouraging us to look in the wrong place: the tech behind Voyager. The board members who died all took the VR tour. We were told not to hamper tomorrow’s rollout in any way. We’ve been pushed again and again in the wrong direction. But the fact is, Voyager devices have no way of harming people. The new version that drops tomorrow isn’t dangerous.”

“You’re sure of that?” Peyton asked.

“Yes.”

“Then what the hell’s going on?” asked Kramer. “You take away that, and you leave us with nothing.”

“Not necessarily,” Logan said. “If they’ve been leading us on a false trail, they clearly wanted to mask the true one. Look at Marceline Williams. She was poisoned by something so unusual, it even aroused the CIA’s curiosity. There’s no way in hell our antagonists would have done that unless they had to hide the fact she died by poison.” He looked at each face at the table. “So the question is, are we sure — really sure — what killed Spearman and Bridger? And what about Janelle Deston?”

And then, something occurred to him.

He turned to Asperton. “You know our overly modest friend in BioCertain?”

“Purchase? Modestly doing a little moonlighting with Spearman and his prerelease implant?”

“He’s Omega-cleared, right? I mean, he’s the one who explained to me how the synaptichron was originally a BioCertain product.”

Asperton nodded. “As much as any of the line leaders are.”

“And he knows the details of our, ah, little problem.” Logan turned away from the table and — after thirty seconds of fumbling with Grace — managed to use the device to contact Purchase.

“Dr. Logan?” came the voice, sounding both anxious and excited. “I’ve been working nonstop on that synthesis you asked for, cross-checking all new Carewell drugs for overlooked contraindications, and—”

“Dr. Purchase?” Logan interrupted.

The voice stopped midstream. “Yes?”

“I’m very glad to hear that. But I’m afraid I have another request. One with priority.”

“Yes?”

“I’d like you to discreetly put together two client lists: those receiving the new Voyager devices, and those with medical implants. Then do a comparison for matches.”

“You mean, like ‘doubles’? Early adopters of the Omega Two rollout, but who also have—”

“Pacemakers. Insulin infusers. Active, passive. IVRs, ‘matchsticks,’ anything.”

“Somebody’s been doing his research,” Kramer whispered, listening in.

“Okay…” Purchase sounded dubious.

“Is that a problem? Too complex, maybe?”

“No, not at all. I have the security level to access databases from both BioCertain and Carewell; it shouldn’t take more than thirty minutes. It’s just that—”

“Good. Please contact me as soon as you have the results.”

Asperton was staring at him. “What possible connection could there be between Omega’s virtual reality and people with diabetes or osteoporosis?”

“We’ll find out.” Logan had asked himself the same question the night before, as he sat in the dark watching Gable and Colbert.

“We’re market leaders in both fields, Jeremy. He’ll probably find thousands upon thousands of matches. Wouldn’t it make more sense to get in touch with Spearman’s doctor, as discussed?”

“I left a message with his answering service.”

“Well, I hope you left it smoking, because if we’re going back to square one, we—” Abruptly, Asperton went silent. In the instinctual way Logan had noticed before at the Complex, the lawyer lifted her hand toward her Sentinel unit: not to hear better, of course — but because what she was hearing was clearly important.